A colleague asked me yesterday about SQL Express 2005 and what restrictions it has. I mentioned in a previous post that SQL Express does not limit user connections.
SQL Express 2005 is Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 lightweight edition, which is free to use and redistribute. This new edition is the upgrade to Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 Desktop Edition MSDE). SQL Express is limited to a single CPU, 1GB RAM, and a maximum database size of 4GB. There is NO workload governor which means SQL will not limit or reduce the speed of queries. SQL Server Express can be installed on multiple CPU machines with more than 1GB of RAM, but the database engine will limit itself to a single processor and only utilise 1GB. Apart from these restrictions, the SQL Server Express database engine is the same one found in the other SQL Server products.
SQL Express does not include Analysis Services, Integration Services, Reporting Services, and Notification Services. Views, stored procedures, triggers, cursors, CLR, XML, and T-SQL all work the same way as in the full SQL Server versions.
Download SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Service Pack 1 from this link. Visit the SQL Express home page for links to useful resources and information on registering for redistribution.
One thing you should be aware of, if you plan to build an application and redistribute a database with it, you should be using SQL Server Express as Windows Vista will not support MSDE.